I would like to humbly draw your attention to what appears to be a misprint in your review of Hannah Friedman's high-school memoir "Everything Sucks."
You cite a passage from Friedman's prep-school memoir in which she is naked and waiting for herself to finish puking Jager so she can do more lines.
Then, in an apparent interpolation of text from a different book review into this one, you print the following:
"This is not a sentence you expect to find in a young-adult book set at an elite private school."
Obviously, those words came from another review, perhaps a review of a memoir about a high school girl's year abroad spent in the cell of Julian of Norwich following in her spiritual heroine's meditative footsteps. I imagine it refers to a sentence such as, "I was beginning to think that my daily meal of steamed barley was delicious, and to find that the clarity of sobriety and prayer was sweeter to me than the Jil Sander purse of my French-class frenemy which I had once so coveted."
It cannot, in any case, be referring to Friedman's description of her naked wastedness at a snooty prep school.
"Not a sentence you expect to find in a young-adult book set at an elite private school"!?
Where the hell ELSE would you expect find such a sentence?
Somewhat-articulate rich people and their tragic Gatsbys and Nick Carraways have been confessing their sordid decadence in every conceivable public forum since the dawn of time. I don't know why. Apparently it's because they believe they've really got us fooled with their bright, fresh exteriors, and it tortures them, so they have to set us straight.
Every five minutes.
With the result that everybody on the planet knows that rich teenagers do nothing all day but their Latin teachers in between speedballs and self-induced vomiting. (They would be doing it with their parents, but their parents are, of course, not around.) The only break in the routine comes when they have to pay off debts to the organized criminals with whom they have become involved.
We all know this. Every memoir or novel of rich youth from Vile Bodies to Kathleen Norris's The Virgin of Bennington to Less Than Zero to an obscure paperback I once picked up in someone's office about some girl who committed suicide in 1973 after being driven to it by the trauma of sex and drugs, has been at pains to show us that the Marquis de Sade was a rank amateur when it came to cruel perversity among his peers.
As for the fact that Friedman is talking about naked puking and cocaine in a young-adult book, Berman apparently has not been keeping track of the field. Problem novels are a major subset of teen literature, often assigned by schools, and "Librarians and teachers are used to parents' complaints about problem novels by now -- that they're too traumatic, too adult, too provocative, etc." (3rd paragraph)
And finally, only a young person--or a very undeveloped one--would be so fascinated by their own substance abuse and bulimia that they'd feel the need to go into such detail about it. Contrast this with Kitchen Confidential's Anthony Bourdain's casual reference to sitting out on a blanket on the freezing New York streets at midnight so he can sell precious childhood treasures to buy more smack. He knows we know the drill, so he mentions and it gets back to the important stuff--sea urchin sushi!
Thus, we have three major factors--the preponderance of Rich Young Decadence novels and memoirs, the increasing explicitness of teen reading, and the fact that only a young person (and her editors) would bother to publish a blow-by-blow account of hurling and snorting for its own sake--which establish NOT the rarity but the OVERWHELMING STATISTICAL LIKELIHOOD of finding such a sentence in a memoir set at an elite private school.
For this reason, I concluded that there must have been an editing mistake and decided to bring it to your attention.
I am now going to stop reading the review of Friedman's book--yes, right after that second sentence--and head off to find the teen spiritual memoir to which the no-doubt-mistakenly-interpolated second sentence must have referred, because I'd like to read it. It does sound unusual.
P.S. I suppose I should add that I'm not trying to criticize Friedman's memoir, just to say that the expression of shock that a book about a RICH PRIVATE SCHOOL would include DRUGS AND NAKEDNESS OMG strikes me as being further out of orbit than Voyager.
